Missing Person

The narrator wanders the streets of Paris. He visits bars, flats, restaurants. He picks through fragments of information, old photos, partial conversations. He is trying to piece together events of which he has no memory, of something terrible that happened during the Second World War in which he is in some way implicated. He does not even know his own name.

One of the great modern French novels, Missing Person made Modiano's reputation, winning the Prix Goncourt. A hallucinatory vision of Paris and its secrets, it drifts through the city accumulating clues, scraps, glimpses of blighted lives as the narrator obsessively hunts for his own erased past.

About Patrick Modiano

Patrick Modiano was born on the outskirts of Paris in 1945. He has written novels, plays and children's books. He also co-wrote the script for Louis Malle's film Lacombe Lucien.

His novels include Place d'Etoile, The Night Watch, The Search Warrant (Dora Bruder), Ring Roads, Honeymoonand the three novellas collected as Suspended Sentences: Afterimage, Suspended Sentences and Flowers of Ruin. Missing Person (published in French as Rue des boutiques obscures) won Modiano the Prix Goncourt in 1978. The novel has since been translated into 32 languages.
In 2014 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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